Spatial Representations and the Jacobean Stage: From Shakespeare to Webster (review)

Space has hit it big. Sometime after Michel Foucault's famous observation that in social thought space had been consistently neglected—construed as little more than the empty container within which temporal processes unfolded—the critical landscape changed. Groundbreaking work by Michel de Certeau and, especially, Henri Lefebvre became widely influential, especially to analyses of postmodernity such as those produced by Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, and Edward W. Soja. In early modern studies the category of space has been important for the turn to geography, exemplified most famously in the work of John Gillies and Richard Helgerson. But it is Steven Mullaney's The Place of the Stage that has made space indispensable for the study of the (geographic and social) "marginality" of the popular theater. Russell West's Spatial Representations and the Jacobean Stage extends Mullaney's analysis by integrating discussion of the theater's "place" in the sociospatial order of early modern London with an examination of the spatiality of the stage itself. In taking this approach, West weds some of the concerns of performance criticism to sociohistorical work on the cultural and economic preconditions for theatrical production, although he is finally more interested in the latter than the former. This wide-ranging book—the spatial metaphors are unavoidable—concludes with the idea of "the theatre as the privileged site of a new form of subjectivity based upon the appropriation of urban space, aristocratic costume, prior literary discourse, and the surplus income of the theatre-going audience" (243).

In his first chapter West discusses a variety of early modern spaces, often quite illuminatingly. (His examination of the spatialized nature of the art of memory, for instance, is compelling.) One sometimes feels, though, that he is working too hard to suggest the significance of space as a critical category for the study of early modern culture; this reader at least was ready to accept his point well before West tired of making it. More important is West's conceptualization of the relationship between the theater and the broader social world of which it is a part. West emphasizes the "indexical" nature of much theatrical representation, which gestures toward rather than imitates the social world. It is through this relationship, as well as through "transfers" between the fictive and real worlds (as in the case of gallants sitting onstage, revealing the permeability of the boundary between these two spatial domains), that stage and society are integrated.

This is not the only way in which such integration takes place in this study, however. For example, chapter 2 considers the use of the rhetorical tool of deixis to anchor the fictional world of the masque in the "here-and-now" of Jacobean court politics, whereas chapter 6 argues for the conceptual symmetry between the actual journey from the walled city to the theaters across the Thames and fictive journeys across oceans: each constitutes a "semiotic and epistemological rupture" (170). It is thanks to the interpenetrability of theatrical and social spaces that West is able to isolate the impact of broad social forces on dramatic representation. Chapters 3 through 6 take up the ways in which early modern drama partakes of specific sociocultural phenomena: the rise of the money economy; social mobility; demographic mobility; and international travel. Chapter 7 seeks to explain how such phenomena are responsible for the "new form of subjectivity" alluded to above.

West offers few extended readings of individual plays; his approach is thematic rather than work-centered. More specifically, he takes up plays that address the sociohistorical phenomena itemized in the preceding paragraph. His reference to "prior literary discourse" notwithstanding, this is a book almost entirely uninterested in the literary or generic dimensions of the plays it studies. For example, West intriguingly situates "the trope of misrecognition" (225) in terms of the rise of empiricism and of situated knowledge, but he does not reflect on how the literary history of this trope...